30 APRIL 1881, Page 13

-WILLIAM LAW'S LETTERS: "CAN" versus" CANNOT." go THE EDITOR OF

THE." SPEC CATOR:1

,Sra,—William Law must have written the sentence quoted in your numbers of the 16th and the 23rd inst. thus,—" No creature can have any misery from which infinite goodness can deliver it."

I did not write to viudicate the true reading, because I had not Law's letters by me, and left theyiudication of it to those who had. But what does move me to write is the ignorance of William Law's opinions which seems to prevail even amongst those who have his works. The sentence quoted above ex- presses Law's views so simply and completely, that it might serve as a text for his treatise, "The Spirit of Love." He was an uncompromising believer in, and asserter of, man's free- will, and held that man had the power of resisting the will of the Infinite goodness which strove to save him. In conformity with this belief, and also with the belief he had in the infinite good-will of God, he attributed titan's misery not to the will of • God, but to man's resistance to that will; and thus William Law's natural sequel to the sentence in dispute world run

thus ' No creature Can have any misery from which infinite 7gooduess. can deliver it;' 'therefore, man's present misery exists -because infinite goodness has not yet succeeded in overcoming his obdurate will, which, in the nature of things, cannot fail to .make him miserable."

I do not undertake to vindicate the orthodoxy of this view —though it certainly happens to be my view—but sill I contend is that it was William Law's view. But it may be said,—Is not this a limitation of the divine power ? I answer as follows, —William Law Was a reasoner of an eminently downright and .sharp-set sort. If he was a mystic—I suppose, I must say,

• though he was a mystic—no man had a greater dislike of anystification.

He believed in the actual, indwelling presence in man of a living God, of infinite love, of infinite power, of indomitable

will. His peculiarity consisted in this,—that he held that this infinite power, love, and, will, meant something intelligible, -herein differing from some modern philosophers (so called), who say that these words mean nothing, or at least nothing that we eau understand, which conies to much the same thing. Now, "William Law was a man who had no patience with people who used words that meant nothing,—a man who would never have spoken of infinite goodness or infinite anything else, unless he thought these words meant something intelligible to those who used them. He looked upon these infinite attributes as attri- butes which we know only in part, attributes infinitely tran- scending our present powers of comprehension, but yet knowable in the sort of sense in which Newton's" Principle" might be spoken of as knowable in reference to a child in the nursery. In fact, he held, with St. Paul, that now we know in part, just as -children do, but that, hereafter, we shall know even us we are known. Now, infinite power—whatever it may be in itself— is knowable to us only as a force that has measured itself against, and has out-measured, all known resistance. A living present power can be only known to us as a power that is now

in the act of measuring itself against resistance, and which has, therefore, not yet overcome that resistance.

Love, again, whatever it may be in itself, is knowable to us only as a desire not yet satisfied, or a fear not yet realised ; the desire of a more intimate communion, or the fear of the dis- ruption of an already existing one. It moves to apprehend some- thing not yet apprehended, to secure something fleeting, to recover something lost, Without this movement it would be insensible,—that is, unknowable.

Will, again, is knowable only to us as the effort to do some- thing not yet done, or to retain something which it needs effort to retain.

It was thus that power, and love, and will were understood by William Law. They were efforts—present incomplete efforts—to apprehend, or to make fast, things not yet apprehended, or made fast. Ih God's dealings with man Law saw infinite goodness— that is, a goodness in whose future achievements he had infinite faith and hope—in the act of dealing with a material not yet made tractable. That material was man's free-will. He men- tions once, in answer to ri questioner in one of his dialogues, his

belief that this material must and will be finally subdued and rendered tractable, but what he generally deals with is its plc- sent intractability, and so he speaks again and again of man's power to resist the solicitations of eternal goodness.—! am,